Cook is definitely one of the world’s best CEOs, although I find it hard to forgive the languishment of the Mac for so many years.
2014 to 2020 was years of high priced, ordinary machines, that only survived on brand loyalty and iPhone halo. Those macs definitely could have been much better, and functionally were not as good as the macs that came before. To this day I reckon the plan was for the iPad to replace the Mac, and when that didn’t work out, the M1 is plan B. Note the IPP has the M1 in it, which suggests it was long term plan, and the lack of redesigned MBA and MBP implies a rushed development for phase 1. I’m glad it happened though, as the growth in Mac sales means the Mac will get love again.
It wasn’t a rush. It was a very deliberate decision to make the first M1 Macs look and feel the same as the Intel ones for two reasons:
1. Familiarity. If it talks like a duck and swims like a duck… People may resist the internal change if a significant external change happens at the same time. Notably Steve did the same thing with the first Intel Macs and the same thing happened with the PowerPC switch. Not rushed in the slightest.
2. With Apple switching the smallest Macs first, it also proved a point. If the M1 chip and other related internals are the only thing that changed, with the designs the same, and then performance, battery life etc. see the enormous improvements they’ve seen, in the same designs as the previous models, then there’s no argument that the chip and related internal changes are the reason.
Not rushed at all. Smart design and smart business.
Tim Cook deserves a lot of praise. From a customer standpoint, Apple has reliably delivered the products it promised even during the chip shortage. Apple rarely overpromises on its products capabilities. I do wish that Apple took more risks, although perhaps not at the "bet the company" level of Steve Jobs. Apple has the opportunity to disrupt the entire computer industry with the M1 and M2 processors but to do that they would have to draw far outside the lines. Steve would have created a Mac Nano by now costing around $300 with a M1 processor. It would have turned the industry upside down as the Windows world has literally nothing to compete with that. In other areas, such as VR, Apple is far behind the rest of the industry. Perhaps their AR glasses will redefine the market the way the iPhone did.
Battery gate was under Cooks watch, misleading millions to falsely buy new iPhones when they only needed battery changes. So far he’s failed to deliver for customers in some major many regards.
Wow. That’s the best you’ve got? The article refers to certain people clutching at straws. Seems it’s referring to people like you.
Apple hasn't been perfect since Tim took the helm but I would agree with the article; overall they are doing well.
Oh, and they were perfect under Jobs? Deal with your Cook hatred.
Huh, the guys point is valid as are others that point out real short comings at Apple. Apples relationship with China must come to an end. Instead they seem to be adopting the attitude of the CCP when it comes to customers and the rights of the general population. Management at Apple is either delusional or actively supporting the CCP out of greed. The unfortunate thing is that Apple seems to have doubled down under Cook when it comes to radical politics.
Oh for the love of… get over yourself. Wrong on so many levels. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
As with my reply to Peza above…
Neither Apple nor any other private company can change the CPP by running away.
Tim could have run away from China at the expense of his responsibility to shareholders and the expense of those workers’ quality of life. Instead he took a stand and made both those things better.
Arguably, in the long term, this may influence the CPP and push some change in there in some ways, but even if not that, at least it gives some power back to the people.
No matter what way anyone spins it, China’s manufacturing leadership of the world is because they have doubled down on building all the infrastructure to enable it. Manufacturing in China isn’t just cheap because the labor is “cheap”. It’s because of the infrastructure they’ve built. I liken it to the revolutionary changes to manufacturing that Henry Ford created with his production line approach — the first of its kind.
There’s plenty of cheap labor in the world. But China has the manufacturing leadership by a long shot.
If Apple takes its business elsewhere, it only opens the floodgates for someone else to come in and make use of all that infrastructure and cheap labor and most likely not pursue the supplier responsibility initiatives Apple insists on.
Better Apple influencing those workers lives than someone else who will care ONLY about profits and not the workers.
@Neil, bravo for using the word 'hogwash'. I thought it was just dinosaurs like me with a penchant for the archaic. Such is the lack of nuanced argument these days that I'm forced to agree with you that much of the criticism levelled at Cook is overcooked – (thank you) – after all, Steve Jobs was a hard act to follow for any successor. But, there is an inherent lunacy in trusting using metrics alone as the measure of worth or value. Company valuations are the most notorious of them all along with market position, dominance, share price and profitability. IBM had all this as it began its descent and was toppled by the fruity one. I doubt anyone would argue that Cook lacks the talismanic qualities of his predecessor (as do other CEOs), but you only need to examine Cook's tenure to see that he has more in common with other blue chips CEOs than not. He became CEO of a company with a creative portfolio not seen before and has coasted on that momentum ever since. The Apple Watch owes its origin to the iPhone/iPad – shrinking the form factor was hardly an imaginative leap. Apple's forays into headphones was enabled through a company takeover where the innovation was brought in. Apple entering the Services space was sound business diversification, no doubt, but calculated to shore up Apple's bottom line by emulating the model used by other companies i.e. hardly innovative. One salutes the move to Apple silicon because this is a genuine leap, but this was a fortuitous outcome of a step that was motivated to control costs in the supply chain, not an innovative quest to break new frontiers (as before). Cook's tenure has also seen the company's OS releases decline in quality significantly. Mercifully for Cook, that earlier product portfolio is so strong that none of the problems during the Cook era have hurt that earlier momentum. Yes, Cook is no vanilla CEO. He stands apart. He is a cash-cow maximiser par excellence with no equal.
Was there ever any doubt? Since the early days of Tim coming on, I have noticed Apple has become more open, plays nicely with the competition. Things have improved significantly and Apple has an ever increasing presence. Steve Jobs was excellent, but imo he didn't play as nice with others and so the Apple brand was mostly relegated to a corner, apart from the iPhones
The opposite couldn't be more true... Apple has reduced its open source commitments, restricted as much as possible what people can do with their Macs and iOS devices added more proprietary connectors and soldered more components in since Cook took over. Jobs made Apple more open beginning with the iMac, and wasn't quite so obsessive about his control over the App Store - after he was persuaded that it was a good idea.
Tim Cook deserves a lot of praise. From a customer standpoint, Apple has reliably delivered the products it promised even during the chip shortage. Apple rarely overpromises on its products capabilities. I do wish that Apple took more risks, although perhaps not at the "bet the company" level of Steve Jobs. Apple has the opportunity to disrupt the entire computer industry with the M1 and M2 processors but to do that they would have to draw far outside the lines. Steve would have created a Mac Nano by now costing around $300 with a M1 processor. It would have turned the industry upside down as the Windows world has literally nothing to compete with that. In other areas, such as VR, Apple is far behind the rest of the industry. Perhaps their AR glasses will redefine the market the way the iPhone did.
Battery gate was under Cooks watch, misleading millions to falsely buy new iPhones when they only needed battery changes. So far he’s failed to deliver for customers in some major many regards.
“Battery gate.” I assume you’re referring to the case where iOS was written to address the inevitable decline of an older phone’s battery power by slowing certain energy-demanding operations, rather than allowing the device to simply crash and shut down.
While an older device slowing operations could be annoying, if it crashed and shut down every time instead, that would really have motivated users to buy new phones more quickly, far more than a slow phone.
The OS throttling only became a controversy because Apple described the function in technical fine print, rather than making a huge public announcement, and some people decided to misunderstand what was happening and declare their outrage.
Apple never hid the opportunity for consumers to get a battery swap instead of buying new. “Battery gate” was just another manufactured “scandal.”
Was there ever any doubt? Since the early days of Tim coming on, I have noticed Apple has become more open, plays nicely with the competition. Things have improved significantly and Apple has an ever increasing presence. Steve Jobs was excellent, but imo he didn't play as nice with others and so the Apple brand was mostly relegated to a corner, apart from the iPhones
The opposite couldn't be more true... Apple has reduced its open source commitments, restricted as much as possible what people can do with their Macs and iOS devices added more proprietary connectors and soldered more components in since Cook took over. Jobs made Apple more open beginning with the iMac, and wasn't quite so obsessive about his control over the App Store - after he was persuaded that it was a good idea.
It was Jobs who created iOS as a closed system. Most people still don’t realize it, but iOS was the first opportunity to create an entirely new device and operating system where software would always be downloaded to the device, rather than installed from physical media. In the old Mac/PC paradigm, there was no good way to control where software came from, and the typical “app store” was Circuit City, Best Buy and Wal Mart. Not so with iOS.
The first iteration of iOS didn’t even allow for third-party developers. That wasn’t a mistake; Jobs wanted a new locked-down paradigm, where an internet-connected device’s security and stability could be closely maintained.
The App Store is an adaptation and extension of that new paradigm, established under Jobs. Tim Cook understands that, and continues to extend that paradigm, including by moving Mac closer to it. It’s not nefarious. It’s a strategy to keep internet-connected devices secure and stable, rather than reverting to the vulnerability free-for-all represented by the Windows model, still emulated by Android.
@Neil, bravo for using the word 'hogwash'. I thought it was just dinosaurs like me with a penchant for the archaic. Such is the lack of nuanced argument these days that I'm forced to agree with you that much of the criticism levelled at Cook is overcooked – (thank you) – after all, Steve Jobs was a hard act to follow for any successor. But, there is an inherent lunacy in trusting using metrics alone as the measure of worth or value. Company valuations are the most notorious of them all along with market position, dominance, share price and profitability. IBM had all this as it began its descent and was toppled by the fruity one. I doubt anyone would argue that Cook lacks the talismanic qualities of his predecessor (as do other CEOs), but you only need to examine Cook's tenure to see that he has more in common with other blue chips CEOs than not. He became CEO of a company with a creative portfolio not seen before and has coasted on that momentum ever since. The Apple Watch owes its origin to the iPhone/iPad – shrinking the form factor was hardly an imaginative leap. Apple's forays into headphones was enabled through a company takeover where the innovation was brought in. Apple entering the Services space was sound business diversification, no doubt, but calculated to shore up Apple's bottom line by emulating the model used by other companies i.e. hardly innovative. One salutes the move to Apple silicon because this is a genuine leap, but this was a fortuitous outcome of a step that was motivated to control costs in the supply chain, not an innovative quest to break new frontiers (as before). Cook's tenure has also seen the company's OS releases decline in quality significantly. Mercifully for Cook, that earlier product portfolio is so strong that none of the problems during the Cook era have hurt that earlier momentum. Yes, Cook is no vanilla CEO. He stands apart. He is a cash-cow maximiser par excellence with no equal.
Oh wow, that’s a long winded, fancy worded way of saying Cook sucks and Apple is stagnated by obtaining innovation from the outside. Bravo, nice single post troll.
Let's see now. My 2010 Macbook Pro suffered a swollen battery episode. I bought a replacement battery and changed it myself in 5 minutes. My 2019 Macbook Pro suffered a battery swell. I had to take the computer to my local Apple Store (luckily only 18 miles away) and from there it was shipped to Apple for the "repair". I was out of the Macbook for 9 DAYS. To be fair, they did the repair no charge even though warranty had expired.
A friend of mine earns his living doing live music shows using his Intel Macbook. He just bought a new M1 Macbook. The professional software he uses doesn't work on it.
Is that really so perfect ? "aim to reduce waste and reuse materials where possible" is not enough, as recycling all 40+ metals and rare earths used for building a new smartphone is not currently effective at all. Major ones like gold, tin and perhaps a few others. But how are you going to gather the Indium inside touchscreens ? Any new smartphone thus does not weigh a few ounces, but rather 300 pounds of raw material extraction, i.e. mining in areas where social rights just don’t exist. Apple business model heavily relies on selling new stuff that lasts just a few years, it is not sustainable and will be questioned in the next decades. And what about this piece saying that Apple has a brilliant face about being environment and climate friendly, but strives differently in the background : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/apple-amazon-microsoft-disney-lobby-groups-climate-bill-analysis
Cook is loved because he generates masses of profit, and whilst he does that the city and share holders will love him, they couldn’t care less about anything else he does like ignore human rights in foreign lands to mass produce products cheaply, their is no conscious when it comes to money and power. Personally I don’t like him, he’s awful to watch in the presentations. Steve was a great presenter and knew how to convincingly talk about a product passionately, Craig’s good also as he has a sense of humour and brings it out in stage, but Cook no, he’s just annoying and comes across as the arrogant man he most likely is.
Oh and I would not state the ‘iPhone’ was the it’s successful consumer electronics device of all time, I would claim the mobile phone was, also wasn’t it the massive success that saved Apple from bankruptcy under Steve Jobs? An awful lot of things under Cook have not gone well.
Incorrect - Cook doesn't ignore human rights in foreign lands, which is why Apple of today has extensive labor auditing systems in place for its contract manufacturing partners.
And you're simply wrong about the iPhone - it is the most successful CE product of all time. "Mobile phones" is not a product, it's a category. Within that category, there is one most-successful product, and it's iPhone. This is a matter of fact, not opinion. It's not open for debate.
Why are you such a dick at all times? You could just pass right on by, but instead actively choose to drop in and share your negative energy with everyone. You obviously have significant hate issues of your own to deal with. Try meditation. Or marijuana.
If everyone would put that troll on their ignore list, he'd go away.
Or maybe he wouldn't, but nobody would see his horseshit, so we wouldn't care if he was here or not.
I think it is fair to say that Steve Jobs knew what he was doing when he picked Tim.
I have little doubt that Cook would not have been the CEO Apple needed in its early years, or even during the crisis years before the iMac, iPod, and later iPhone really turned it into the company it was always meant to be. But Steve picked Cook because he knew that he (Jobs) was not the right CEO for the multi-billion juggernaut Apple was to become -- Cook was. Even if Steve had not had cancer, I expect he would have retired to Chairman by the time he actually passed.
The trolls who "hate" Cook are idiots who didn't invest in the company when Cook took over, and have no retirement now as a result. They probably couldn't run a church bake sale, let alone a company that is now worth $2 trillion, so their opinions are as worthless as the time they spend typing up their hater screeds.
...I used to look forward to Apple products, and would buy (b)leading edge... Now I hesitate until I have to. It seemed through 2011 profit served design and the customer first, yet since increasingly has design served profit...? Zeitgeist? I don't know enough to comment on attribution (CEO) however I have no desire to own airpods that wear out after a few years, or a home speaker that is always listening and has no analogue input option, or a watch that syncs to a mac on a desk via servers in California (or any mac device), or be forced to pay for a touchbar on a laptop that I may never use (rumoured discontinued), or a pro that can't upgrade GPU, nor invest in any computer without flex in ram, storage, battery or macOS unless perhaps it is benefitting ultra compactness like the 12" macbook. That said as a shareholder I was rewarded, and the aesthetics of the latest hardware seem impressive, with kudos to the latest volley of iPhone and iPad mini redesigns, leaving me conflicted vs a raving fan for so many years... It can't be an easy gig, just wishing it felt more customer first on all fronts as it used to...
Steve would have created a Mac Nano by now costing around $300 with a M1 processor. It would have turned the industry upside down as the Windows world has literally nothing to compete with that.
You are the only person who thinks this. Nobody is asking for this product.
A friend of mine earns his living doing live music shows using his Intel Macbook. He just bought a new M1 Macbook. The professional software he uses doesn't work on it.
Your friend isn't very good at his job if he didn't check the compatibility of his *third party* software with a new architecture.
Apple rarely overpromises on its products capabilities.
They literally describe loads of their products as magic though. I always cringe as bit whenever they do that.
It a bit of a reflection of Clarke's (third) law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It's rather remarkable, for example, that we now have pocket-sized wireless phones that allow you to send documents and make video calls to people all over the world, or wristwatches that are more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer, or tablets that can store thousands of books, or software that replaces racks of expensive music and video equipment, etc..
(Of course there is also the "evil wizard/demon" part - where the system does something horrifyingly bad and you have no idea why or how it even did it.)
Also Apple - like a stage magician - tries to create convincing illusions (such as "dragging" an image on your iPhone screen, pressing a button that doesn't actually move, having a phone respond to you as if it were a person, or creating imaginary objects that appear to be in your living room) that surprise and delight. I think this surprise and delight was a big part of Steve Jobs' famous keynote presentations.
Cynics might that it's all smoke and mirrors, but I would argue that "magical" illusions help to make the products useful, usable, and funl. ;-p
Tim Cook in his time as chair of Apple ߍas taken a dynamic innovative, creativity-based tech company and reshaped it into effectively what is a marketing company with a focus on tech. Dynamism and vigor have yielded to ossification and complacency; the Tim Cook capital-centric ‘vision’ or perhaps more appropriate shareholders-centric ‘tunnel-vision’ will bring about a day when the Apple has become so calcified it simply won’t have the ability to keep up with an influx of smaller, nimbler startups arising out of Asia & South America, and the company crumbles into insignificance & obscurity (at least in terms of a ‘tech’ company, a core tenant it’s already drifting away from) From a consumer-perspective, this is going a really good thing, as it will liberate the market.
Comments
1. Familiarity. If it talks like a duck and swims like a duck… People may resist the internal change if a significant external change happens at the same time. Notably Steve did the same thing with the first Intel Macs and the same thing happened with the PowerPC switch. Not rushed in the slightest.
2. With Apple switching the smallest Macs first, it also proved a point. If the M1 chip and other related internals are the only thing that changed, with the designs the same, and then performance, battery life etc. see the enormous improvements they’ve seen, in the same designs as the previous models, then there’s no argument that the chip and related internal changes are the reason.
Not rushed at all. Smart design and smart business.
There’s plenty of cheap labor in the world. But China has the manufacturing leadership by a long shot.
@Neil, bravo for using the word 'hogwash'. I thought it was just dinosaurs like me with a penchant for the archaic. Such is the lack of nuanced argument these days that I'm forced to agree with you that much of the criticism levelled at Cook is overcooked – (thank you) – after all, Steve Jobs was a hard act to follow for any successor. But, there is an inherent lunacy in trusting using metrics alone as the measure of worth or value. Company valuations are the most notorious of them all along with market position, dominance, share price and profitability. IBM had all this as it began its descent and was toppled by the fruity one. I doubt anyone would argue that Cook lacks the talismanic qualities of his predecessor (as do other CEOs), but you only need to examine Cook's tenure to see that he has more in common with other blue chips CEOs than not. He became CEO of a company with a creative portfolio not seen before and has coasted on that momentum ever since. The Apple Watch owes its origin to the iPhone/iPad – shrinking the form factor was hardly an imaginative leap. Apple's forays into headphones was enabled through a company takeover where the innovation was brought in. Apple entering the Services space was sound business diversification, no doubt, but calculated to shore up Apple's bottom line by emulating the model used by other companies i.e. hardly innovative. One salutes the move to Apple silicon because this is a genuine leap, but this was a fortuitous outcome of a step that was motivated to control costs in the supply chain, not an innovative quest to break new frontiers (as before). Cook's tenure has also seen the company's OS releases decline in quality significantly. Mercifully for Cook, that earlier product portfolio is so strong that none of the problems during the Cook era have hurt that earlier momentum. Yes, Cook is no vanilla CEO. He stands apart. He is a cash-cow maximiser par excellence with no equal.
A friend of mine earns his living doing live music shows using his Intel Macbook. He just bought a new M1 Macbook. The professional software he uses doesn't work on it.
Yep I guess Tim has it right.
And what about this piece saying that Apple has a brilliant face about being environment and climate friendly, but strives differently in the background : https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/01/apple-amazon-microsoft-disney-lobby-groups-climate-bill-analysis
And you're simply wrong about the iPhone - it is the most successful CE product of all time. "Mobile phones" is not a product, it's a category. Within that category, there is one most-successful product, and it's iPhone. This is a matter of fact, not opinion. It's not open for debate.
(Of course there is also the "evil wizard/demon" part - where the system does something horrifyingly bad and you have no idea why or how it even did it.)
Also Apple - like a stage magician - tries to create convincing illusions (such as "dragging" an image on your iPhone screen, pressing a button that doesn't actually move, having a phone respond to you as if it were a person, or creating imaginary objects that appear to be in your living room) that surprise and delight. I think this surprise and delight was a big part of Steve Jobs' famous keynote presentations.
From a consumer-perspective, this is going a really good thing, as it will liberate the market.